“Brilliant work by many people has resulted in an extraordinarily profound, precise description of the physical world,” concluded Frank Wilczek of MIT, in summarizing the 31st International Conference on High-Energy Physics in Amsterdam. “Because of this we can ask, and formulate plans to answer, some truly awesome questions.” Examples of new high-precision results presented at the conference included the measurements of the mass and width of the W boson at LEP and the Tevatron; the strong coupling constant at HERA and LEP; and CP violation in B mesons from the BaBar and Belle experiments, which Yossi Nir from the Weizmann Institute described in terms of the first successful precision test of the Kobayashi-Maskawa mechanism of CP violation. A full report of the conference will appear in next month’s issue of CERN Courier.
